Tuesday, April 26, 2005

For me it was yet another reminder that - no matter how much we believe we are the pinnacle of modernity and civilization - we are just a hair's breadth away from falling into barbarism. If anything, our arrogance as a society makes us more vulnerable to such a fall.

The people of Nazi Germany, the people of the Rwandan Genocide, the European invaders of the Americas, the lynch-mobs of the U.S., the soldiers in Abu-Ghraib, the slavers of Sudan - and the countless others who would take days to fully enumerate here - we have no fundamental difference from any of those people.

They were just ordinary people - manipulated into unimaginable horrors.

The only thing that can protect us from the descent into horror like that is a willingness to learn from history, and act on what we've learned.